The Girls Who Grew Big, by Leila Mottley (Knopf). This striking novel tracks the friendships among a group of teen moms as they struggle and strive in a small, gossipy beach town in Florida\u2019s sticky-hot panhandle. Simone, their strong-willed leader, gave birth to twins in the back of her boyfriend\u2019s truck. A young woman named Adela joins the pack after her parents send her away from Indiana, in shame, to live with her grandmother. Her arrival causes friction\u2014one mom falls in love with her; Simone, on the other hand, is not so sure that Adela belongs\u2014until a series of crises forces the women to see that, together, they can be \u201cmother and child and freed, all at once.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Scrapbook, by Heather Clark (Pantheon). Anna, an American student at Harvard, falls deeply and unaccountably in love with Christoph, who is on exchange from Germany, in this melancholy d\u00e9but novel. Clark\u2019s narrative begins in 1996, but her characters\u2019 entanglement develops under the long shadow of the Second World War, during which their grandfathers fought on opposing sides. As Anna contends with her infatuation, and with the weight of history, Christoph alternately embraces and eludes her, creating a sense that nothing\u2014in their relationship, in the world\u2014is what it seems. Full of references to music, literature, and philosophy, as well as heady discussions of Nazism and the complexities of national memory, this ambitious book, by an accomplished biographer of Sylvia Plath, ultimately fails to connect the stakes of its central romance to those of the larger questions that loom throughout.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Girls Who Grew Big, by Leila Mottley (Knopf). This striking novel tracks the friendships among a group…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88,1766,8807],"class_list":{"0":"post-25901","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-magazine","11":"tag-textaboveleftsmallwithrule"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}